In 2011, former president Donald Trump went on Good Morning America to tease a presidential run and declare his skepticism that then-President Barack Obama was born in the United States, a conspiracy that soon proved so useful to his political profile that he became its champion. At the time, racist birtherism was considered shocking and the mainstream press reported it as such.
Thirteen years later, we’ve been worn down: Trump’s prodigious lying has become a part of American political life. In a new book that pulls no punches with its title, Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy, Bill Adair traces the escalation of lying in contemporary politics. But true to the book’s title, Adair urges readers to look beyond just “the big lie”—that is, that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump—and see how widespread and out of control has become in the Republican party.
Adair, the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, is well-equipped for the task. In 2007, he founded the fact-checking site PolitiFact, which went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its coverage of the 2008 election.
Beyond the Big Lie draws up a frank taxonomy of political lies, dives into Adair’s early-2000s neighborhood friendship with Mike Pence and his family (where he got a front-row-seat to Pence’s descent into political opportunism), and looks at the radicalizing effects of social media. Ahead of an event at Flyleaf Books, the INDY sat down with Adair to talk about the election and learn more.
Hi Bill. I’ll start by saying that I am sorry that your book is so relevant right now.
Yes. Yeah, I’m the guest you don’t want at your house.
Well, you start the book talking about the balancing act of fact-checkers wanting to appear nonpartisan but, you know, having to acknowledge that one party does consistently lie more than the other. I’m curious how you think that anxiety extends choices journalists make about coverage?
Sure, and there are different genres of journalism here, so let’s take them separately. I think fact-checkers do a great job—I don’t think that they put their thumb on the scale for either party when they’re doing individual fact-checks, and I think they try their best to get a good sampling of things to check. I also don’t expect political fact-checkers to shout from the rooftops that Republicans lie more.
When I started off the book, that’s where I was headed. But the more that I talked to political fact-checkers and others in journalism, I realized that’s just not realistic. But I do think that columnists and sort of other entities, maybe universities or independent groups, need to collectively show this pattern—because it is unmistakable, and it is crippling our discourse.
What I propose at the end of the book is some sort of a scoreboard that would be online, maybe even something like the national debt block that you see in New York City that calls attention to the latest lies, the total number of lies by party, to highlight this disparity. I really think it’s a serious problem that there is such a disparity. And I think that journalists have, like me, ducked the questions because they want to appear impartial.
It also seems—not outside of the scope of journalism, but bigger than journalism. Too big of a problem for journalism alone to carry.
I agree. I think this is a systemic problem in our politics, that one party has chosen to just adopt this as a strategy and the other party has decided not to as much. And that’s not to say the Democrats don’t lie—they do, and fact-checkers catch them in plenty of lies. But there is this big difference and it’s something that people should know.
The book is called Beyond the Big Lie and you make an effort to talk about the political climate of lying itself and not just Trump. But I wonder if you can talk about the differences in the scope of lying you’ve observed between 2016, 2020, and this current-year election.
This pattern existed when I started covering Congress in the late ‘90s. I began to notice it covering tax bills—Republicans are just so good with their talking points and those talking points often exaggerate things or or even have outright lies. I began to notice this pattern then, and it got worse over time. People that I talked to said that it really became part of the Republican strategy with Newt Gingrich, who sort of cemented it as part of the Republican culture.
But then Trump really supercharged it, because he lies so much every day, multiple times, that he normalized lying in ways that no other politician has.
And his lies have, of course, been adopted by many members of his party about things such as immigration. Here in North Carolina, we’ve seen it with FEMA and disaster relief, often linking disaster relief to immigration, within these lies. It’s just terrible, what’s happened. Of course, those [lies] get echoed, not just by other Republicans, but by people in conservative media. And that has, I think, made the party’s culture even more welcoming to lying.
I wanted to ask about Western North Carolina. Beyond the FEMA stuff, are there other lies you’ve seen enter the lexicon during this disaster?
Two phenomena have interested me in watching it. One is that some Republican politicians have been willing to speak up against it and basically say, “Hey, fellow members of my party, this is terrible. We shouldn’t do this. FEMA has been here and been responsive, and the state has been here and been responsive, and we need to stop lying about it.” So I have appreciated those Republicans who have done that.
So that’s one thing—but then Trump comes back and repeats the same lies that have already been debunked. This is someone who just doesn’t care about what the facts are, he’s just going to say whatever. This is something that was driven home to me by a psychiatrist who I interviewed in my chapter the lying “Hall of Fame,” who tried to explain Trump’s lying. Basically, he said it’s not like [Trump] tries to justify lies. He just does what he thinks he needs to say at the moment.
I don’t want to phrase this as “Are we [screwed] with Artificial Intelligence,” exactly—but how can news organizations handle and fact-check the rise of AI?
We don’t know about how the bad guys are going to use AI. We also don’t know how the forces of good are going to use AI. We’ve been experimenting here at Duke with trying to use it to clone fact checks, with the idea that there’s a shortage of fact checks around the country and that having AI, you could generate cloned fact checks using generative AI in states where you might not otherwise have any fact-checking. We call that half-baked pizza.
Now in the meantime, as you suggested, the bad guys are finding ways to use AI too, and that’s hard to detect. In the same way that we can’t, as faculty members, detect when a student uses generative AI on a term paper, it’s difficult to detect when someone’s using AI to create a fake message. It allows someone to hyper-target an audience in ways that haven’t been possible before.
Election Day and the days following it are a vulnerable period for misinformation. How can the INDY and other news organizations help curtail misinformation in real time?
I think we should be really careful about putting out the claims of the people who say they’ve won, about people who say there are shenanigans in voting.
The people spreading lies after the election are going to try to develop themes in some of the falsehoods about the vote, and we need to verify those before we allow any of them to get out.
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